FromSoftware's DLC looks to make an already great game even better

by Michael McWhertor

My first steps into Elden Ring's new Shadow of the Erdtree expansion feel like coming home again. After traveling there, by touching a withered arm, I step out onto a grassy plain, and see a crumbling giant tree in the distance. The land is littered with intangible tombstones and spirit world versions of enemies I've faced before: dogs and wandering nobles. But it's not long before I'm faced with something terrifying in this new region, the Shadowland, in the form of a giant walking iron cask filled with embers and burning prisoners.

Trying to cut down on that hundred-foot monstrosity, I learn pretty quickly that even the highly leveled, generously equipped knight I've been given to play as part of a three-hour preview of the DLC is no match for it. It kicks large, inescapable piles of burning debris at me as I try to escape. A handful of other unfamiliar monsters – Burrow Birds, lesser cousins of the Death Rite Birds from the Ring of Fire, and lithe ashen-skinned humanoids armed with twin circular blades – pile in and beat my poor knight.